Holmes: Romney's UN act flops

Tuesday

Sep 25, 2007 at 12:01 AMSep 25, 2007 at 3:19 PM

The United Nations is seven blocks off Broadway, but when the General Assembly is in session it is as entertaining a ticket as you can find. The leaders of nations great and obscure take their star turns on the UN stage, soliloquizing about crucial issues and petty disputes, serving up comedy and drama.

Rick Holmes

The United Nations is seven blocks off Broadway, but when the General Assembly is in session it is as entertaining a ticket as you can find. The leaders of nations great and obscure take their star turns on the UN stage, soliloquizing about crucial issues and petty disputes, serving up comedy and drama.

This year, the part of the villain is played by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who hopes to top the performance last year of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. He plays to the provinces, hoping the jeers of the Americans will bring cheers home in Iran.

Ahmadinejad has been confronted by a succession of would-be American heroes, each trying to out-tough the others, from Scott Pelley of "60 Minutes," to the president of Columbia University, to George W. Bush.

What with a presidential campaign under way, plenty of other actors are trying to step into the footlights, denouncing Ahmadinejad from the left and right. The most over-the-top performance comes from Mitt Romney, who doesn't just want to condemn the president of Iran, he wants to put him on trial.

In a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon - and, more to the point, in campaign commercials airing this week in South Carolina - Romney asked that Ahmadinejad's invitation to address the General Assembly be revoked. "The only way he should be greeted in the United States is with an indictment under the Genocide Convention."

Where to start? Well, Ahmadinejad is the elected president of a member of the United Nations, which was founded some 60 years ago on the proposition that politics and international disagreements shouldn't stop nations from civil discussion. When the UN chose New York for its headquarters, Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt agreed to extend diplomatic immunity to its delegates.

Romney's foreign policy experience mostly consists of glad-handing foreign athletes. But even that experience should have taught him that international events, whether the UN General Assembly or the Winter Olympics, can't succeed if the host country reserves the right to arrest any foreign ruler whose policies it doesn't like.

More absurd is the contention that Ahmadinejad be indicted for genocide. Maybe Romney's getting Iran confused with Turkey or Sudan, countries really responsible for past and present genocides. Ahmadinejad has said a lot of stupid things, and his country's human rights record is appalling, but genocide has a quite specific meaning under international law, and it doesn't apply to Iran, at least not yet.

Romney may be referring to Ahmadinejad's alleged, implied desire to commit genocide, as reflected in his support for terrorists and what Romney characterizes as the Iranian leader's statements about "wiping Israel off the map."

Those comments, offensive in any language, have been loosely interpreted. For the record, here's what Ahmadinejad said, translated from the Farsi: "This regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page(s) of history."

That sounds more like a call for regime change than an incitement to genocide. And if advocating regime change is grounds for indictment, Romney and a lot of other Republicans ought to consult with their lawyers.

This isn't the first time Romney has traded diplomatic niceties for political showmanship. When former Iranian president Muhammad Khatami spoke at Harvard last year, Gov. Romney refused to provide state police protection, which is presumably reserved for those who share Romney's politics.

The politics that matter most to Romney are those of Republican primary voters, and a GOP candidate can't go wrong bashing the UN in South Carolina. But voters in every state should be watching closely how candidates mix domestic politics with foreign policy. The next president will have to deal with Iran with toughness, respect and smarts. He or she should know how to weaken a dangerous leader like Ahmadinejad at home, not strengthen him, how to instill trust instead of paranoia, how to use American power as an incentive to negotiate, not to force a desperate war.

We've seen how a president's preference for demonizing foreign leaders and inflating the threat of weapons of mass destruction can lead to unprovoked and unwinnable wars. Mitt Romney seems to think the way to get George W. Bush's job is to imitate his worst foreign policy tendencies. I hope he's wrong.

From here, Romney's off-Broadway debut looks like a flop.

Rick Holmes is opinion editor of the MetroWest (Mass.) Daily News. He can be reached at rholmes@cnc.com.

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